Partnership to free up more money for suicide prevention programs

JoAnne Viviano The Columbus Dispatch @JoAnneViviano

Wednesday

Jun 13, 2018 at 7:30 PMJun 14, 2018 at 5:28 AM

After Sandy Williams lost her father to suicide seven years ago, just two days shy of his 75th birthday, she realized there was much she didn’t know about depression and the frustration it can bring. Since then, she’s worked to create awareness in others.

“I didn’t understand it at the time, and that takes its toll on me,” said Williams, board chairwoman of the Ohio Suicide Prevention Foundation. “I wish I had understood more. Hopefully we can help somebody else.”

Williams is confident that the foundation will be able to do that more often as it enters into a new, two-year agreement with the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Ohio, referred to as NAMI Ohio.

The foundation is moving into NAMI Ohio offices, and as of July 1, NAMI Ohio will assume administrative and fundraising roles for both groups. Each organization will retain its own budget and board of directors. The change is expected to save the foundation more than $100,000 annually to be put into programming.

“We can prevent this stuff, we really can, but you’ve got to talk about it and you have to have people like Sandy, and her board of directors and the staff, spend all their energy in trying to do everything they can to prevent any more pain,” said Terry Russell, NAMI Ohio executive director. “NAMI Ohio thinks we can help by lessening the burden on them for a sometimes chaotic bureaucracy.”

The change comes on the heels of a report issued last week by the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which shows that Ohio’s suicide rate increased 36 percent from 1999 to 2016.

In 2016, 1,706 Ohioans died by suicide, an average of nearly five a day, or about one every five hours.

The Ohio Suicide Prevention Foundation currently receives $750,000 in annual funding from the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and $150,000 from the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services. Some additional funds come from donations.

Much of those resources go to contracts for research done by other agencies, such as Ohio State University and Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus and Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Russell said.

One of the goals, he said, is to pull together those agencies and others for a summit to determine a prevention action plan, he said.

The foundation also plans to build its support of 50 community coalitions and 25 teams called LOSS — Local Outreach for Suicide Survivors, Williams said.

“With suicide, it’s really going to be a grassroots effort for people to talk about it, to help remove the stigma of it and to get people help that they need,” she said. “These coalitions are absolutely critical.”

She said other initiatives, including an online suicide-prevention training program and an interactive “man therapy” program, that encourages men who need help to seek it, will continue and be better publicized.

She’d also like to see programs expand, perhaps to include specific initiatives for Ohio seniors.

Along with freeing up staff, NAMI Ohio hopes to raise even more funds for the foundation's work.

“I find it a tragedy that we don’t have more money in suicide prevention in the state,” Russell said. “It’s a lack of public will. The citizens of this state should be crying, screaming that we do something about this epidemic.”

The lack of support, Williams said, is related to stigma.

"Nobody feels free to talk about it, and because of that, we don’t get the funds, we don’t get the public interest and public uprising to say we’ve got to do something about this,” she said. “We need to work to remove the stigma so people talk about it, and then I think we will have an uprising.”

To get help for yourself or someone else, contact the Franklin County Suicide Prevention Hotline at 614-221-5445; the Teen Suicide Prevention Hotline at 614-294-3300; or the national Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255/TALK (or 1-888-628-9454 for Spanish speakers). To reach someone at Ohio's 24/7 Crisis Text Line, send 4HOPE to 741741.

jviviano@dispatch.com

@JoAnneViviano

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